How NASA finds oil.
Unfortunately, as NPR reveals, we’re not talking about the kind that’s still safely underground: The NASA Earth Observatory explains that since ocean waters are never […]
SONG: Your Catalogue
SONG: “Your Catalogue”. (OGG version here.)
ARTIST: grant.
SOURCE: NBC News, “New wild cat species is ide…
Read moreScience Art: Beebe's Bathysphäre, 1934
This is an image of William Beebe’s bathysphere, as placed on Wikimedia Commons by ETH Bibliothek. It was creat…
Read moreScience Art: Power of RCA Electron Microscope, May 1955
These are diatoms, I think, seen by two different microscopes.
As the caption from Popular Electronics says…
Read moreScience Art: Red Pepper, 1910.
Red pepper (Cayenne pepper) will cure almost any case of la grippe within 24 hours, or so they say. At least no…
Read moreScience Art: Figs. 1315-1333 (Various rotary piston engines), 1890.
This is a page of figures from (deep breath) The engineer’s sketch-book of mechanical movements, devices, appli…
Read moreX in uniform.
MAPS has published a study confirming that MDMA really does work in treating post-traumatic stress disorder: Participants treated with a combination of MDMA and psychotherapy […]
If you love a sewage-eating robot, set it free.
So New Scientist recommends in a new report on an artificial gut that allows robots to become self-sustaining: [F]ood-munching robots have been demonstrated in the […]
Read in color!
New Scientist teaches you how to make yourself synaesthetic: Olympia Colizoli at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, and colleagues… gave seven volunteers a […]
Science Art: The Microwave Sky, Planck Telescope, 2010
Click to embiggen This image – a composite view of, well, everything – was made by the European Space Agency’s Planck Telescope, an orbiting observatory […]
Get up. Really.
New York Times quotes research that proves exercise won’t save you. It’s the sitting that kills you: …[S]cientists from the University of South Carolina and […]
To cure my wife, you want to transplant my *what*?
New York Times gets to the fundamentals of the strange world of microbes-as-medicine: “She was just dwindling down the drain, and she probably would have […]
Super squid penis. (No, this is not spam.)
BBC recently covered the salacious details when scientists discovered a squid’s enormous sexual organ: The male squid’s sexual organ is almost as long as its […]
Prozac pollution and shrimp suicide.
BBC News reports that antidepressant runoff is encouraging shrimp to go toward the white light: The researchers say this causes the shrimps to forget to […]
Humans: warming the globe for 15,000 years.
New Scientist steals my innocent view of humankind before the Industrial Revolution. It turns out we were probably messing up the climate in the Ice […]
Science Art: Giovanni de Dondi’s Astrarium, 1364.
This is a modern tracing of a 1461 illustration of a 1364 drawing of a mechanical clock that represented the movement of the universe.
Leonardo da Vinci: Paleontologist.
Smithsonian reveals yet another secret talent from the original Renaissance man. He was a forefather of fossil science: In a new paper in the journal […]
Addicted to heartbreak
The same circuit that controls your jonesin’ for just one more is also, the American Physiological Society says, in charge of your heartbreak: The pain […]
We’re gonna need a bigger boat. MUCH bigger.
Fossil-hunters have found the remains of a creature they’re calling Melville’s Leviathan, AP reports. It’s a whale that, 12 million years ago, snacked on humpbacks […]
Song of the God Particle.
The BBC has a simulation of the sound of the Higgs boson. That’s what the harmonics of the mass-bearing subatomic particle will sound like if […]